The Mises Blog, not one to give the government much of a break, argues that the decision on home education last week in California was narrow and has been mis-interpreted, and applies narrowly to the credentialing of home tutors, not parents performing home-schooling.

Maybe, but the teacher's union certainly thought that was what the judge was saying and the judge went out of his way to say specifically "Parents do not have a constitutional right to home school their
children" which is an overly broad statement that was not at all required had the decision really been intended to be narrow. Jeffrey Tucker at Mises argues:

It comes down to a case of a judge who got carried away with his rhetoric and didn't understand the law.

2 Comments

Jim Collins:

Since there doesn't appear to be anything in the Constitution about the right to an education, I can see where they are coming from. Personally I think that they need some new Judges. Has anyone checked to see if any of those Judges has a prescription for wacky weed?

Rob:

Whether the judge is wacky or not. The opinion he wrote is clearly negative for the homeschool community. He also got two others to sign on.

The problem here is that in California, homeschooling has no legal standing. It is pursued largely via a provision for private schools to define what they require of their teachers in terms of training/certification/whathaveyou. There are no homeschools in California. There are private schools in the home. This may seem like a small distinction, but it really is the homeschool community leveraging the private school portions of the law.

Other states explicitly allow homeschooling as such, California does not.

This ruling appears to delegitmize all forms of education other than that which is undertaken by a certified teacher, regardless of the environment/location.

This mess has been brewing for awhile, with parents being told that they cannot exempt their children from sex education, which Dan Allender author or The Wounded Heart would call sexual abuse (sexual behavior or information which is age inappropriate and/or undesired). This is only one of several issues wrapped up in this "argument".

It boils down to this: Are the parents or the village responsible for/in control of a child's upbringing? Dewey, the father of modern education, was nothing like neutral in this. For him the purpose of education was to create good citizens.

In a statist world, the definition of "good citizen" can be and is becoming quite scary.